Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend where I was able to articulate my thoughts on dependency injection more eloquently than I ever had before. In fact, I may have phrased this better than any nerd in the history of programming. That's a bold statement, so you be the judge:

"I didn't just swallow the inversion of control kool-aid, I went on the I.V. drip."

Unity.Mvc3

I recently starting working on a new project where they wanted to use Microsoft's Unity for their DI framework. It's not the exact flavor of IOC container would have chosen, but I am all for best practices regardless of specific implementation.

Important side note about MVC3: There is a new way to wire up for dependency injection. MVC now natively exposes a System.Web.MVC.DependencyResolver that you can set to use your container. This means that you no longer need to create a custom MVC controller factory to inject your dependencies.

While researching how best to implement Unity in my MVC 3 project, I came across Unity.Mvc3 by DevTrends. (Here is a little overview.) It's a great project for all the right reasons:

It's up to date.

It's lightweight.

It solves pre-existing issues.

Note that last point. There are a lot of wrappers out there, and a lot of simple copy paste code snippets, but I really appreciate when someone goes out of their way to do more than just write their own version of something. To be specific, unlike many of the alternatives Unity.Mvc3 works with IDisposable dependencies, and that just happens to be a requirement of the project that I am working on.

First and foremost, singleton dependencies (anything registered with ContainerControlledLifetimeManager) were not being disposed. This was easy enough to fix however, I just wired up a dispose call to my Bootstrapper in the MvcApplication's Application_End method.

Second, the NuGet package's initialize method was spelled wrong. I actually view this is actually a good thing, because it means that I am not the only person who makes spelling errors in code that they opensource! HA HA HA!

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Over the past month I spent a lot of time helping teach a good friend of mine how to write advanced JavaScript. Although he had worked with JavaScript many times before, he did not know a lot of the simple things that make JavaScript the crazy dynamic rich development experience that it is. Together we built up this series of examples to help teach everything from language basics to object orientation.

Why do we need yet another JavaScript tutorial?

JavaScript is an interesting language. It is loosely typed, the object orientation has been hacked in over time, and there are at least 10 ways to do anything. The most important thing you can do when writing JavaScript is to choose a set of conventions and stick with them. Unfortunately with so many different ways to do things out there, it's hard to find tutorials that are consistent in their conventions.

Just like developing in any other programming language, understanding the fundamentals is key to building up an advanced application. This tutorial starts out extremely simple, and incrementally gets more advanced. It shows alternative implementations for different tasks, and tries to explain why I prefer the ones that I do. Meanwhile it always follows a consistent set of conventions.

Let's get to the tutorial!

This tutorial comes in 16 lessons. They are designed to be debugged with Firebug for Firefox. If you don't want to actually run the scripts then you can always just read them by downloading the small htm files below and opening them in notepad (or whichever text editor you prefer).

If all that wasn't enough or it just got you thirsty for more, here are some additional resources to help start you down the path of becoming a ninja with JavaScript. My recommendation is that whenever you are writing JavaScript you should have w3schools open in a second browser window at all times.

Search This Blog

Loading...

About Tom

Tom DuPont is a Software Engineer living in southern California. Tom has been a tool at CodeSmith, made love at Match.com, and currently makes war for Blizzard Entertainment. He specializes in C#, ASP.NET, and even that crazy JavaScript stuff.

Listen to Tom

Tom is a host on the QQ Cast, where he helps answer geek culture's most superfluous questions.